IOTA Enters the Spotlight as Orobo Wins GS1 Hackathon for Food Safety Innovation

• Orobo’s IOTA Digital Product Passport has won the 2025 Hackathon at GS1 by providing solutions to food traceability and compliance through encrypted data solutions.
• GS1’s IOT Data Hackathon extends real-world IoT applications, while IOTA advances with cross-chain access, institutional custody, and pan-African trade integration.

At the GS1 Go Green Hackathon 2025, Orobo has topped the list with an IOTA-powered Digital Product Passport (DPP) system. The solution was created in partnership with NDara and GrailX, and its features help tackle traceability, compliance, and food safety throughout the supply chain, from farm to kitchen. The project integrates layers of encrypted data, next-generation scanning technology, and decentralized identifiers to facilitate the verification of products.

Its system uses the IOTA Tangle network to store product data in an immutable and transparent way, thereby avoiding the use of traditional gas fees. Orobo’s DPP is backed by the scanning hardware installed by GrailX and NDara’s data infrastructure. This proves useful in food logistics, where the end-to-end compliance and data flow transparency are of great concern between the suppliers, regulators, and consumers.

GS1 Hong Kong organized the Hackathon with support from Cyberport and Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. It attracted developers, students, and startups aiming to apply IoT data in real-world industry challenges. The event’s objective was to foster collaboration while generating scalable digital solutions for traceability, identity, and sustainability.

IOTA: Data Hackathon 2026 Builds Momentum for Real-World Applications

The IOT Data Hackathon 2026 is already in progress, and it’s rooted in the same principle but aims to broaden the range of IoT technology to other sectors. Once more hosted by GS1 Hong Kong in partnership with Cyberport and HKSTP, the program is aimed at connecting real-world data with practical deliverables. The participants are pressed to come up with solutions to real societal and corporate problems using smart technology and safe data infrastructure.

In the 2026 version, there will be a focus on traceability, sustainability, and integration across sectors, where scholars, corporations, and startups are also invited. The hackathon has presented the requirements of digital product passports, encrypted data, and verifiable information, which mark the next step in innovation across the physical and digital space. The other goal of the organizers is to establish a better talent pipeline, linking entrepreneurs with industry partners.

Meanwhile, IOTA adoption in the business world is continually growing. It has integrations with Stargate Finance and LayerZero, which now makes the network interoperable with more than 150 chains. This allows the flow of unwrapped asset liquidity to enhance capital efficiency within systems. As leading on-chain analytics platform Nansen points out, “No more siloed value. Capital efficiency meets decentralization.”

BitGo now provides institutional custody for IOTA, supporting regulated asset storage and enterprise-grade access. It opens the treasury operations and DeFi on a large scale with SOC 2 compliance and insurance. IOTA Identity 1.7 Beta was also released, and it supports W3C DIDs and verifiable credentials. The tools are compatible with the new IOTA Trust Framework that regulates how digital identities are used to issue and verify.

Moreover, the IOTA’s ADAPT platform is also being implemented in trade activities in the African Continental Free Trade Area. As we earlier reported, it has a reach of 1.3 billion, and it digitalizes trade documents and reduces shipping and customs clearance processing time.

Despite these developments, the IOTA price has seen a dip, mirroring Bitcoin’s price decline today. At press time, IOTA was trading at $0.07157, a 2.36% decline.